Sorry, this may be slightly off topic, but another skilled trade that many people overlook is that of aviation maintenance and repair. There’s a high school in nyc devoted to this with like 2000 kids, believe it or not. Super cool. And it graduates about 1/10th or maybe even 1/7th of all people who work on airplanes (all numbers are approximate) in the entire world.
They describe the job as useful, a great entry to going into engineering of various sorts, always in demand worldwide, meaning opportunity for international travel.
However, that system also tracks students very early (in middle school), so it is less flexible for those whose interests or talents change after middle school.
@compmom, money maybe should not be a top concern, but job security and flexibility certainly should be.
Do you see less demand for analytical and critical thinking skills in the future? Yet I don’t see many people saying that the trades are a great way to gain those skills.
Mind you, I think that gaining certain skillsets (in the trades or in college) certainly can be useful, but you also don’t want to be go down a path and find at 50 your entire profession automated away (and that’s more likely with some professions than others).
I would argue that blue collar assembly line type jobs are not really “trades” in the classical sense. They are jobs for people who don’t have any marketable skills.
There is a big difference between a skilled trade career and a low/no skill job. Apples and oranges really…
Passion may drive someone to pursue something other than college, but there is no rational argument that the money is better (on a risk-weighted basis) without college. The guy the OP quotes is using confirmation bias and ego to delude themselves otherwise.
I shouldn’t have said that so absolutely. If a kid has no desire to focus in school, but can focus on something physical or “real world” right away, then college is probably not their best place.
@Muchtolearn - My DH is in construction and frequently comments on how the poor education of people he works with can hamper their ability to get ahead on the job. One may not need a college degree to do well in the trades, but many of the people he works with are educated, and that is an asset.
Your family member is absolutely right about trades and technician jobs being a great way to go, but you might be able to convince him that in today’s world, having advanced math and science skills, and being a polished communicator, and even having an understanding of the world around you, will actually make for a better career even in those other areas.
I think its great when students can pick up technical skills in high school (e.g, Computer Integrated Manufacturing and other Project Lead the Way-type high school tech classes). Maybe his daughters could get some trades experience in the summers, while attending college! For sure, if my son can’t find a summer engineering internship, he will be working with his dad on a construction site. Why not cover both angles?
We have many family members who work in skilled trades. Skilled trades today are far more complex that in previous years, especially for those who work in the manufacturing sector. Pay typically exceeds $100K for union workers, and trading off labor with your counterparts also has many benefits (e.g. building a house for material cost only). There is a pretty significant skilled trades shortage in many parts of the country, so I’d highly recommend it to anyone who loves to work with their hands and mind.
@fractalmstr - today’s assembly line jobs are often quite demanding technically, and the lower-echelon assembly line increasingly automated.
But my point is, that with robotics taking more & more jobs away from the assembly line - and so many companies manufacturing overseas - OP’s relative may be unrealistic about future prospects for such positions, even for skilled tradesmen.
If people have the aptitude, skilled trades can be the way to go. I didn’t want to go to college, but I have zero mechanical or sales aptitude. I reluctantly went to college and grad school; I’ve fortunately been successful.
Our local NPR station KJzz just had a spot on this topic this week …the spot was too lean but it linked to a whitepaper by Doug Young that, after reading it, made good sense to me. It was focused on UTI tech school students and looking at 10 years out…but I think it was worth reading. He spoke about thinking about these things, in relation to each kid, as early as middle school…not leaving the consideration for late high school. Talked about automation issues and skilled trades and artisan as alternatives to plan old LA educations.
First, a large part of why German tradespeople are looked upon in a more positive light is due to a mix of having enough highly paid jobs for their skillset AND the fact on average, most enter vocational school…especially the skilled trades with higher skillsets/academic background than your average US middle school graduate.
Second, there’s still a bit of social snobbery against those who aren’t university graduates in some occupational/social areas dominated by university graduates though that’s far less of an issue than it was before/during WWII.
Also, German businesses which employ tradespeople work in a close educational/training and proudly provide substantial financial support for the vocational training HS/higher vocational training institutes(HS and a couple of years afterwards) so students pay no tuition/fees.
While US corporations/businesses used to do this to some extent with substantial training programs after HS/college, that was done away with sometime in the '70s according to some older relatives and posters here on CC who remembered when they were commonplace. Unpaid internships don’t come close to what the German businesses offer vocational HS/higher vocational institute students who hope to work in their fields.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the German college track system is set up differently than the US system.
One illustration of this is how a gymnasium(university track high school) graduate…especially in the past was regarded more equivalent to an American student who has already completed 2 years of undergrad at a respectable/elite college/university.
Much of the skills described in the 2 year business admin degree used to be covered by vocationally oriented
“business colleges*” or “secretary schools” of decades past here in the US or abroad.
Institutions which were regarded somewhere between a current vocational-oriented HS and a for-profit college in the time periods when they were much more commonplace.
Purple Titan of course money is a concern! Sorry if I was not clear. I was just trying to say that the attitudes in our culture toward the trades are not based on income, but on a kind of, as one person put it, “social snobbery,” that doesn’t make sense at all.
This completely depends on the student’s aptitude. A person with no gift for mechanical work or plumbing isn’t going to make $130K, no matter how good her training. And someone who hates academic work but who loves to tinker with stuff is more likely to thrive in trade school than in college.
I wish my parents had encouraged my middle brother to go to culinary school instead of college. He wasn’t cut out for school but would have fit right in the culture of a professional kitchen.
@nycparent12 “Your family member is absolutely right about trades and technician jobs being a great way to go, but you might be able to convince him that in today’s world, having advanced math and science skills, and being a polished communicator, and even having an understanding of the world around you, will actually make for a better career even in those other areas.”
I think something along this line is what I am going for.
I do agree thought that trades are great. My D2 is a freshman engineer at Lehigh leaning toward Chem E. If she could find a summer experience learning basics of plumbing, that would be a really great opportunity, in my opinion.
Social snobbery for tradespeople isn’t limited to the US culture. It exists to a limited extent in Germany and surprisingly for some…in many other parts of the world including the former/current combloc nations.
One good illustration of the latter was how some higher-level prestige/plum jobs and social leadership positions were closed to those who didn’t possess a university degree in the former Soviet Union/Eastern bloc nations. This included junior-field-grade military officers whose officer training schools(comparable to our FSAs in function) were regarded much more as higher-level vocational training institutes.
Anyone who compared them to the Soviet/Russian universities would have been laughed at…especially by university graduates/students who were on the fast-track to mid-top bureaucratic/management positions within the Soviet communist party/government and state apparatuses…such as the former KGB.